Chapter 16
The hiss from the line changed while we stood there. It had been a steady leak, the kind of sound a tire makes when it gives up slowly. Now it pulled. I felt it in my shoes before I heard the difference, a faint tug at the soles, as if the ground itself had started to inhale. The yellow-brown froth on the limestone thickened and slid toward the footing of my house, drawn along the same path the hoses took under the grass. The crawl-space hatch, thirty feet away at the side of my house, rattled in its frame, a dry wooden shudder that repeated every few seconds like something knocking from below.
Margaret watched it happen without surprise. That was the worst part. She did not flinch at the froth or the rattling hatch or the way the air seemed to lean toward my foundation. She looked like a woman watching a machine do exactly what it had been built to do.
"There is no bypass on your side," she said. Her voice had gone flat. "I told you that wrong, and I am correcting it now because the loop will not wait for us to finish arguing. There is no line running out to the street from your lot at all. It is a closed circuit. The intake sits under the cellar stairs, on my side, and the loop runs under both houses and back again. That is why the draw never leaves the property. That is why your meter never showed it and mine barely did. The power feeds the compressor, the compressor holds the loop, and the loop holds whatever is down there."
Callahan stared at her. His face had gone very still, the way a man's face goes when he realizes a story he helped build has just developed a crack he cannot plaster over. "You told the grand jury something else," he said. "You told them Edwin was off the project site two days before the blast. You swore under oath he was in St. Anne's cardiac wing that whole week, that he had not set foot outside the facility in months, that he could not have been near the depot or the cellar or any of it."
"I swore to what I needed to swear to," Margaret said. She did not look away from him. "You know what was at stake. You were there for the meetings. Do not stand in my yard now and pretend you only just learned the shape of this."
"You swore to a room," Callahan said, stepping closer to her, his voice dropping low enough that I had to lean in to catch it. "A cardiac wing with nurses and charts and visiting hours and a sign-in sheet at the desk. Do you understand what happens if a prosecutor finds out that room was empty? That is not a mistake on a form, Margaret. That is perjury in front of a grand jury, and it turns every statement you ever gave about that fire into kindling. It gives them a reason to pull every record, every filing, every signature with your name on it, and to start asking who else swore to things that were not true."
She looked at him for a long moment, and something passed between them that I could not name β not affection, not quite fear, but the tired recognition of two people who had carried the same secret so long they had stopped checking whether the other one was still carrying it. The hatch rattled again, harder this time, and the wing nuts on the junction box burned against my palm when I brushed them reaching for my footing. I pulled my hand back fast. The heat in that metal was not electrical, not the way a hot wire feels. It was deeper, like the box itself was holding something under pressure and the pressure was looking for any seam it could find.
Callahan did not look at the box. He kept his eyes on Margaret.
"Then where was Edwin?" he asked. "If he was not in that room, where was he on the night the depot burned?"
Margaret glanced toward the cellar doors at the side of her house, the new enamel-coated bilco doors I had noticed the first week I moved in and thought nothing of, because new doors on an old house are the most ordinary thing in the world. Her eyes stayed on them a beat too long, and in that beat I understood that everything I had been digging toward all morning was underneath those doors.
"He was here," she said. "He was under this house, in the cellar, the whole time you people were writing reports about a bedridden man fifteen miles east."
"How long was he down there?" I asked.
She did not answer me. She answered Callahan, because Callahan was the one she was afraid of, and fear decides who a person talks to.
"Long enough," she said. "Long enough to finish what he started."